Friday, April 18, 2014

Writing robs you of life. It literally sucks the life from you. It's a fat, slurping, pulsing leech hooked into your jugular day and night. Every hour spent hunched on a chair at the keyboard shortens your lifespan. Studies prove it. Sitting for long periods wrecks your circulation, raises cholesterol, and shortens your lifespan. Five years, ten years -- your love of writing will surely punch your ticket way sooner than designed.

Writing is killing you just as surely as smoking, drinking, or parking yourself on the couch for hours and hours a day.

Writing means ignoring the real world. Writing disconnects you from reality. It's a solitary exercise, a long journey into oneself. The trip commences when you enter a cold black tunnel. You wait for the light to return but, after many miles, you finally realize this tunnel never ends.

Writing dissolves friendships and strangles new ones, because a writer must give up social activities and instead sit that butt in that chair and pound that keyboard. Writing demands you pull the blinds on every window, lock every door, switch off every light. Writing hates sound. Writing hates light. Writing hates LIFE.

But most of all, writing hates YOU.

It knows you're not good enough. Writing is every disapproving parent of every girlfriend or boyfriend you've had and will have. Writing wants you to fail. Writing throws every obstacle in your path to make you stumble and fall and look like an idiot in the process. Writing watches you gleefully, laughs when you fail, and is already planning the next speed bump, the next pot hole, the next detour.

People who aren't writers think writers have it easy. They think writers pay no price for the glory of fame and fortune. After all, writing costs nothing, right? Words come free. No visit to the store to restock. No relying on other people to perform their small task in the big project. Non-writers believe all a writer does is think it and write it. Anyone can write. Anyone can think. How hard can it be?

Writing is death, that's how hard it can be. And it should be the first thing taught in English class. Etched in white chalk on that blackboard: WRITING IS DEATH. WRITING HATES YOU.

There should be rehab for writers. I'd go. Six weeks later I'd throw open those doors and emerge a beautiful butterfly, newly thankful for the warm sunshine and the cool summer breeze and the sweet scent of a million flowers. I'd join my butterfly brethren and we'd flit and frolic, love and laugh and...

I'd kill myself.

I don't want to be a butterfly. I don't want the light. I want the dark. I want the emptiness. I want the nothingness. I want a void I can fill. I want the absence of life so I can create life.

Writing hates me. I want writing to hate me. I don't want friends. I want a nemesis. There's no challenge without one.

Writing is death. It can be no other way. Only through death can stories come to life.

CODA: For anyone less enthusiastic about the "embrace sweet writing death" philosophy, go ahead and raise your desk to standing height, get yourself a writing partner, and enjoy your extra decade of productivity, you beautiful butterfly.

Fun Joel — He's got links to every other screenwriting resource you could possibly want. Steal 'em all then blame it on THAT guy.

Go Into The Story — Screenwriter and instructor Scott Myers' young son urged his father to 'go into the story and find the animals.' Scott also found Lincoln's hat, a Pokemon, and Tara Reid's self esteem.

Jeremy Slater — Jeremy founded the popular site 'How To Write Screenplays, Badly' (see link above). That site is mothballed now, because Jeremy proved to be no good at writing screenplays badly when he sold his spec 'Pet' to MGM. Word of advice: if you meet Jeremy on the lot, don't ask why he's wearing the bear suit.

John August — Site tells the story of a Hollywood screenwriter who drinks a few beers, has a few laughs, and then writes the Charlies Angles movies. I forget how the story ends. Go there now and learn from a pro. Then come back. Bring beer.

Josh Friedman — Josh wrote Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Brother, did that ending suck, and I'm not complaining about the bacteria (the kid is alive? ALIVE? Why not throw in the 'it was all a dream' ending!). Luckily, Josh's blog anti-sucks bigtime.

Mystery Man On Film — Blog run by a powerful enclave of Hollywood A-list screenwriters who work night and day to impersonate a supposed 'mystery man' who blogs incessantly about everything screenwriting. There, now you know. Pffffft. Mystery my ass. The only mystery is, are these blueberries or boysenberries on my muffin?

ScreenwriterBones — Philip Morton's blog title holds a subject and a verb, but leaves us asking the question, 'bones what?'

Terry Rossio's MySpace Blog — You will know Terry, of course, as the writer of Little Ghost Fighters (Philippines: English title). Also, he wrote a popular cartoon called Shrek. And Pirates of the Carribean, starring Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. Kidding, just kidding. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio rule Hollywood with their superhuman storytelling powers. That seems to be working out way better than the time they tried to rule Hollywood with their colony of vicious (but poorly trained) vampire bats.